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Every election cycle, the same chorus rings out: Democrats should stop talking about identity politics.
What they really mean is: stop talking about people like me.
I’m a Black man from rural South Carolina. My grandmother used to talk about watching the Ku Klux Klan march through her hometown. The story always gave me chills. She’d talk about how the family rushed inside and prayed. And she’d talk about how there was no one to turn to because many police officers “wore blue during the day and white hoods at night.”
This wasn’t a dusty photo in a history book. This was her life—and her fear—passed down through my mother to me. And it wasn’t even in the distant past. Fast forward to 1987. I was 11 years old, about the same age as she had been, when the Klan marched through downtown Orangeburg. History repeated itself. All of those memories and fears pass down through me to my own sons.
So when I hear people—sometimes even in my own party—say we should “move away” from identity politics, what I hear is, set aside the very experiences that shaped who you are. Forget the struggles your community still faces. Quiet down about the things that define you in every other part of your life.
That’s not just wrong. It’s insulting.
For me, identity politics isn’t an “issue” on a list. It’s the lens through which I see the world because it’s the life I’ve lived. It’s knowing that the fight for voting rights isn’t theoretical. My grandfather did everything but literally fight (to the best of my knowledge) to get his vote counted. He lived through poll taxes and literacy tests, and he treated his right to vote as sacred. In the years after he died, as I saw voter ID laws enacted and polling places quietly moved or their hours cut, I always came back to what he told me the last time we voted together: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t matter. Or that you don’t count.”
That’s why we need to understand that even though Democrats often gain 80-90% of the Black vote, our loyalty is not unconditional. It’s been earned over generations by standing with us against forces that would strip away our rights, our dignity, and our safety.
Let’s be clear: Republicans are masters of identity politics. They just don’t call it that when they’re doing it. Evangelicals? Gun owners? Rural cultural conservatives? Those are identity groups.
The GOP courts them openly, shapes entire platforms around them, and no one in the political press calls that “identity politics.” But talk to Black voters about racial justice or to immigrants about a path to citizenship, and suddenly it’s a “distraction” from the “real issues.” When we talk about “kitchen table issues,” let’s actually look at the folks sitting around that table. It’s crystal clear what they have in common. And let’s not pretend their identities don’t influence how they interpret those issues.
I’m pragmatic. I care about winning because winning is how you get the power to protect people and make change. But pragmatism doesn’t mean pretending that race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion don’t matter.
In my part of the country, Black voters are pragmatic. We ask: Will this candidate fight for me? Will they make my life better? Will they protect my kids’ future?
You can’t answer “yes” to those questions if your strategy is to erase the very people you’re asking to stand with you.
If we abandon the fight for racial equity or gender equality because some pundit thinks it’s “bad politics,” we’re not just making a tactical error. We’re telling millions of Americans their lives are expendable.
I refuse to do that.
Yes, we must win elections—all of them, from the presidency to the school board. Yes, we must talk about kitchen-table economics and deliver results. But we can’t win by pretending identity doesn’t matter, or by telling the communities that form the backbone of our coalition to wait their turn.
We can walk and chew gum: defend democracy, deliver for the middle class, and stand unapologetically for racial equity, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights.
Because when we fight for those most at risk, we strengthen democracy for everyone. And if we let those fights go, we’ll lose more than an election. We’ll lose the very soul of this country.
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